Wednesday, September 06, 2017

theatlantic |Public schools have always
occupied prime space in the excitable American imagination. For
decades, if not centuries, politicians have made hay of their supposed
failures and extortions. In 2004, Rod Paige, then George W. Bush’s
secretary of education, called the country’s leading teachers union a
“terrorist organization.” In his first education speech as president, in
2009, Barack Obama lamented the fact that “despite resources that are
unmatched anywhere in the world, we’ve let our grades slip, our schools
crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us.”

President
Donald Trump used the occasion of his inaugural address to bemoan the
way “beautiful” students had been “deprived of all knowledge” by our
nation’s cash-guzzling schools. Educators have since recoiled at the
Trump administration’s budget proposal detailing more than $9 billion in
education cuts, including to after-school programs that serve mostly
poor children. These cuts came along with increased funding for
school-privatization efforts such as vouchers. Our secretary of
education, Betsy DeVos, has repeatedly signaled her support for school
choice and privatization, as well as her scorn for public schools,
describing them as a “dead end” and claiming that unionized teachers
“care more about a system, one that was created in the 1800s, than they
care about individual students.”